Isaac Watts lived through a time of collision between traditional Christian faith and the forces of 'Enlightenment'. How he engaged with, critiqued and adapted to the veneration of reason is fascinating and still instructive. Dr Graham Beynon, Watts scholar and pastor, profiles this fascinating man, his thought and his times. ...
Kevin Moss is a Christian Heritage trustee and PhD candidate in intellectual history. Earlier this month, I wrote a short piece about the toxic impact of ‘cancel culture’, especially as it is impacting upon higher education. It is worth noting that the introduction of reductionist ideologies within the secondary school system means that we are churning out undergraduates who are ill-equipped to cope with the free intellectual environment that hitherto characterised our Universities. Analogically, ‘Foot-binding‘ was a historical and disfiguring practice conducted in China, only finally abolished in the early 20th century: its victims were no longer able to walk naturally and freely. It is quite likely that the shackles of reductionism may have a similarly constraining impact upon intellectual development, but labelling academic freedom as the ‘problem’ misses the point by a wide mile. Academic freedom can only be a ‘problem’ to students who are suffering from a societally-induced pathology, disabling the exercise of critical faculties, and subverting the capacity to tolerate opinions other than their own. Of course, those who have the greatest interest in fostering or supporting cancel culture are the same people most likely to deny that it exists. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago documents the painstaking lengths to which the Soviet...
Kevin Moss is a Christian Heritage trustee and PhD candidate in intellectual history. ‘Cancel Culture’ may not be new, but it’s suddenly gone mainstream. Perhaps it’s a secondary symptom of the COVID-19 virus. It seems that those who are doing the ‘cancelling’ are keen that our awareness of what is going on needs drastically paring back. Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist, has written at quite some length, in order to document his own experience at the hands of the mobs who seem to control social media. The irony here is that scientists who are Christians have, for many years, found themselves ‘cancelled’ (or existed under the threat thereof) for any public dissent from the presuppositional naturalism which has been used to weaponise the biological sciences against the very (theistic) worldview which gave rise to them. Suddenly, those of atheistic or agnostic persuasion, are discovering that this toxic ideology has quietly morphed into something that is far more dangerous to Western intellectual culture, and has the capacity to bring the whole house of cards down. Well, evolution’s a bit like that. Of course the intellectual viability of the scientific project was always wholly dependent on its theistic foundations. To mix my metaphors; since Darwin, the...
Kevin Moss is a Christian Heritage trustee and PhD candidate in intellectual history. Like most organisations, the implications of some kind of post-COVID-19 reboot for a charity I support are enormous. Running a visitor centre, where people have the temerity to move about, requires immensely detailed precautionary measures. Visitors have the right to feel safe, but so do our staff, and therefore how does one introduce sufficient structure and control to limit undesirable social contact, when the whole point of the exercise is to welcome people and interact positively, constructively with them? That’s not going to happen whilst wearing hazmat suits, or by steadfastly hiding behind polycarbonate screens, or by spraying anti-viral agents on anything that has a pulse. And so, we plan, we plan . . . The precise content of new instructional signage. The location of the automatic hand-sanitiser dispenser. The types of masks to be stocked, and who gets to wear them. How we get people in and out of the Visitor Centre through the same door, whilst at the same time minimising contact. How we manage movement around an open, round, internal space. How we deploy new signage or barriers without at the same time completely vandalising the unique experience...
In today's guest post, Kevin Moss, Christian Heritage trustee and PhD candidate in intellectual history, sheds light on the threat posed by a largely unchecked culture of death. It’s never very far away, that opportunistic nihilism, venturing forth under cover of COVID-19 in order to bulk up its trophy-bag. Whilst the NHS and even the Government, are beavering away to save as many lives as possible, it is odd to think that there are organisations that exemplify radically different ideological commitments. BPAS, one of the biggest providers of abortion services in the UK, has (according to media reports) been agitating for perhaps the biggest liberalisation in the regime, since 1967. And, very likely they’ll succeed, given that our attention is quite naturally focused on sustaining and protecting life, rather than snuffing it out. And, last Saturday, as I opened the little plastic bag that contained my weekend newspaper supplement, what should drop out, but a flyer promoting the services of ‘Dignity in Dying’ (DID), the ultimate expression of cultural nihilism. The usual pampered celebs looked earnestly out of the leaflet, attempting to convince us that, only through the administration of a lethal cocktail of barbiturate and anti-emetic, we may have any hope...
‘The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the most eminent people of past centuries.' - René Descartes* Reading great literature is like peering into a limitless reservoir of human experience, unlocking with each turn of the page ideas and perspectives that lend clarity to our own thoughts. We read to make sense of ourselves and others and, especially during a moment of global uncertainty and pandemic, we read to make sense of our unpredictable world. In this Christian Heritage webinar, Dr Chris Watkin (Senior Lecturer, French Studies, Monash University) and Kevin Moss (PhD Candidate in Intellectual History) discuss what we can learn from Albert Camus’ seminal work, The Plague, and especially how these lessons coalesce with a Christian worldview. For further reading and resources, please visit Chris' website here and Kevin's blog here. *Discourse on Method and Related Writings...
In this webinar, Dr Chris Watkin and Kevin Moss discuss what we can learn from Albert Camus’ seminal work, The Plague, and especially how these lessons coalesce with a Christian worldview. ...
Best known for his seven-book series, the Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis was a scholar and writer of exceptional ability. Today, however, the scale and variety of his contributions to literature and thought are often obscured. Dr Jacqueline Glenny introduces us afresh to a man and a mind of enduring influence who had a deep connection to Cambridge. [embed]https://roundchurchcambridge.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/19133247/jacqueline-glenny-cs-lewis-and-his-legacy.mp3[/embed]...
Christians do not have a monopoly on seeing what's wrong with the world. This talk examines three secular sin labels as a diagnosis of the problem. Each adds something significant to our understanding of why everything is so bent out of shape. While these labels are useful, they are inadequate when compared to the better diagnosis found in the Bible. [embed]https://roundchurchcambridge.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/17154512/andrew-fellows-is-sin-plausible-in-the-modern-world.mp3[/embed]...
The Round Church is one of Cambridge’s oldest and best-known buildings. It predates the University by almost a century. It is one of only four round churches still standing in the UK. It has been much loved and discussed by poets, preachers, antiquarians, and journalists down the centuries. And yet so much about its past remains a mystery. Debunking some popular stories about wandering Knights Templar, this talk, held in the beautiful setting of the Round Church itself, uncovers the far more fascinating truths that lay behind this amazing building. It looks at the foundation of the church in the early decades of the twelfth century and some of the ideas which led its founders to make it round. [embed]https://roundchurchcambridge.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/26144425/robert-evans-deciphering-the-round-church.mp3[/embed]...